Minutemen Meltdown - WA Chapter Kicked Out

BREAKING NEWS: Dissenting officials kicked out of Minuteman Civil Defense Corps

By Jonathan Clark
Herald/Review

Published on Wednesday, May 23, 2007

BISBEE — At least two state-level officers of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps have been expelled from the civilian border-watch group after raising questions about its executive leadership, particularly that of MCDC President Chris Simcox.

According to internal documents that surfaced on the Internet this week, 18 state MCDC leaders sent a memo on May 8 to Simcox, Vice President Carmen Mercer and Executive Director Al Garza asking them to attend a meeting in Phoenix to address perceived problems, including a lack of financial accountability and Simcox’s leadership style. In a memo dated May 14, Simcox responded by denouncing the meeting as unauthorized and informing the 18 signers that their membership in the Minutemen organization would be terminated if they attended the meeting. ...(article)

On Simcox list of members to be terminated are: Hal Washburn, WA Ops Director & Claud Lebas, WA Chapter Director. With those two kicked out, that pretty much wipes out the membership of the Washington State Chapter.

So far the Washington State Minutemen website has nothing to say on the subject.

However, the Southern Poverty Law Center has some analysis and Mark Potok director of SPLC's Intelligence Project summed up what Simcox Minutemen was really about.

... The infighting has delighted some of Simcox’s critics outside of the MCDC, including the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which responded to the expulsions Wednesday with an article posted to its Web site titled: “House of cards: Chris Simcox’s Minuteman group, the country’s largest civilian border patrol, may be collapsing.”

The story is accessed via a link reading “extremist Minuteman group implodes.”

From the outside, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps always looked like a fundraising racket,” Mark Potok, director of the SPLC’s Intelligence Project, told the Herald/Review. “Apparently, it looks that way from the inside, too.” ...(article) [my emphasis added]

I just wonder what hurts our local border vigilantes more; that they've been kicked out of the MCDC - or - that the whole thing was always a racket and they were the suckers.